About Us

The Sjögren’s International Collaborative Clinical Alliance (SICCA) has been funded since 2003 by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) to:

Develop new classification criteria for Sjogren's syndrome (SS)

Better characterize the SS phenotype and genotype

Establish an SS data and specimen repository to support future research, including genetic studies, by investigators worldwide

The Alliance built an international registry of uniform clinical data and biospecimens that is now being made available to scientists all over the world, with the intent of improving understanding and treatment of Sjögren’s syndrome. The SICCA Biospecimen / Data Registry is directed and managed by UCSF professors Lindsey Criswell and Caroline Shiboski and is supported by a NIDCR/NEI grant.

The new classification criteria developed by the SICCA group was recently provisionally approved by the American College of Rheumatology.

SICCA is a multidisciplinary effort that includes dentists (oral medicine and oral pathology specialists), ophthalmologists, rheumatologists, a geneticist, an epidemiologist, and statisticians.

Clinical data and specimens were collected from 9 participating research sites